Gallery: "Abandoned: America’s Vanishing Landscape"

By Kenneth Baker, SFGate.com |
August 6, 2014

The Richmond Power Plant’s Turbine Hall is one of the biggest open rooms ever designed and once housed the world’s largest Westinghouse turbo-generators, providing power to much of Philadelphia’s bustling industrial and residential sectors in the middle part of the 20th century.

Photo By Eric Holubow

Filled with a half-dozen linotype presses, the seventh floor of the Arcade building in St. Louis is a stark contrast to the rest of the mostly barren structure.

Photo By Eric Holubow

The Scranton Lace Co. in Scranton, Penn., was established in 1890. From 1916 to 2002, the company remained the first and largest known producer of Nottingham Lace in the United States.

Photo By Eric Holubow

Prior to its closing in 1993, Chanute Air Force Base was one of the oldest facilities in the United States Air Force.

Photo By Eric Holubow

More than 50,000 students graduated from Cass Tech over the years. Among the students who wandered the old Cass Tech’s halls: singer Diana Ross, comedians Lily Tomlin and David Alan Grier, auto executive John DeLorean and former Detroit Mayor and convicted felon Kwame Kilpatrick.

Photo By Eric Holubow

Discarded school supplies, textbooks and maps were emptied out of classrooms to make way for construction of Westinghouse College Prep School at the same site.

Photo By Eric Holubow

Warped gymnasium floor at the original Central Visual and Performing Arts High School in St. Louis. Founded in 1853, Central is the oldest public high school west of the Mississippi River.

Photo By Eric Holubow

Originally opened as a vaudeville house named the Liberty Theater in 1918, the Paramount Theater in Youngstown, Ohio, was acquired by the Paramount Pictures Corp. in 1922 and converted to a movie palace, designed to seat 1,700 patrons.

Photo By Eric Holubow

The nine-story, English Gothic-style City Methodist Church in Gary, Ind., was completed in 1925 at a cost of more than $1 million, with over half the financial contributions coming from the United States Steel Corp.

Photo By Eric Holubow

The St. John of God Church had its carved limestone removed piece by piece, numbered and shipped north to Old Mill Creek, Ill., where it will be used on the 40 acres the Chicago Archdiocese owns to build the Renaissance Revival church.

Photo By Eric Holubow

As membership declined in the second half of the century, the Hammond Masonic Temple lost the ability to sustain itself and abandoned the structure in the 1990s. After a 2006 study concluded restoration would be cost-prohibitive, the building was demolished to make way for a new charter school.

Photo By Eric Holubow

The SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral was built in 1890 in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. In 1992, SS. Peter and Paul merged with five other congregations to form the new St. Charles Lwanga parish. The SS. Peter and Paul Church closed after the merger was complete.

Eric Holubow, author of "Abandoned: America's Vanishing Landscape."

A blogger in Detroit allegedly coined the term "ruin porn" in 2009. He used it to describe the then-new vogue among photographers for producing lavish color images of deserted buildings in his city, especially their interiors, gnawed by time, the elements and hopelessness.

Browsers familiar with that critical slur may apply it too hastily to the work of Chicago photographer Eric Holubow, collected in "Abandoned: America's Vanishing Landscape" (Schiffler; 207 pages; $50).

Holubow, who directs the photography program at Chicago's Institute of Design, began his sad, nationwide survey of abandoned institutional structures long before the global economic unraveling provoked new waves of fear and gloating over the fate of the old American industrial order.

In art and literature, the fascination with ruins — as omens, as objects of nostalgia or doleful reflection — goes back many centuries. In photography, practitioners such as Robert Polidori, the great Canadian Robert Bourdeau and the Bay Area's Richard Misrach and Katherine Westerhout, among others, have preceded Holubow with explorations of this aesthetic territory.

But Holubow has grouped his pictures under headings such as Working, Learning, Healing, Playing and Praying. The resulting catalog of images records not just forsaken buildings but the erosion of institutions and common interests and collective will to sustain them.

Holubow sensibly sidesteps politics, but a social thinker mounting a critique of capitalism for its reckless, merciless waste of human and material resources could not wish for a more damning pictorial dossier.